Sitting at my little wooden desk by the window in the weird 14-degree Berlin weather, sick with the flu and rejecting any possibility of celebration, I have finally had the chance to "take stock".
2022 began for me with a long bus ride to Portugal, a type of 'holiday' to visit friends and colleagues, which was punctuated by different forms of trauma over events of the last years. By the time I got back - February 16th - I had a week in Berlin to look around at what was happening, before things would change completely again.
The period after that week is something of a blur. 3 weeks on the cold streets with people from Ukraine, desperately trying to find some sense of orientation together, were followed by a year in which my work completely changed, and the entry of many new influences who would become good friends and colleagues. The first emergency "Cultural Workers Cafe" events initiated by Inga Zimprich, Viktoria Lyakh and Sönke Hallman at Flutgraben were created to support incoming cultural workers to meet each other and engage in mutual support. These were followed by the development of Cultural Workers Studio, a shared space which became both my home base at Flutgraben by Berlin's River Spree, and a kind of utopian cultural project you can only find in Berlin. Through supporting the studio as it's only member not from Ukraine, I co-moderated a film festival, supported a livestream concert, modeled on the catwalk, and learned how to cook various Ukrainian specialties, as well as convivially supporting my colleagues in finding some sense of stability in the new (often very bureaucratic) environment.
